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accepted abbreviation for the doctrine that all deeds bring upon the doer an accurately proportionate
consequence either in this existence, or, more often, in a future birth. At the end of a man's life his character or
CHAPTER III. GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF INDIAN RELIGION 65
Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I.
personality is practically the sum of his acts, and when extraneous circumstances such as worldly position
disappear, the soul is left with nothing but these acts and the character they have formed as, in Indian
language, the fruit of life and it is these acts and this character which determine its next tenement. That
tenement is simply the home which it is able to occupy in virtue of the configuration and qualities which it has
induced in itself. It cannot complain.
One aspect of the theory of Samsara which is important for the whole history of Indian thought is its tendency
towards pessimism. This tendency is specially definite and dogmatic in Buddhism, but it is a marked
characteristic of the Indian temperament and appears in almost every form of devotion and speculation. What
salvation or the desire to be saved is to the ordinary Protestant, Mukti or Moksha, deliverance, is to the
ordinary Hindu. In Buddhism this desire is given a dogmatic basis for it is declared that all existence in all
possible worlds necessarily involves dukkha or suffering[133] and this view seems to have met with popular
as well as philosophic assent. But the desire for release and deliverance is based less on a contemplation of the
woes of life than on a profound sense of its impermanence and instability[134]. Life is not the preface to
eternity, as religious Europeans think: the Hindu justly rejects the notion that the conduct of the soul during a
few score years can fix its everlasting destiny. Every action is important for it helps to determine the character
of the next life, but this next life, even if it should be passed in some temporary heaven, will not be essentially
different from the present. Before and behind there stretches a vista of lives, past, present and to come,
impermanent and unsatisfying, so that future existences are spoken of not as immortality but as repeated
death.
4
This sense of weary reiteration is increased by two other doctrines, which are prevalent in Hinduism, though
not universal or uncontested. The first of them identifies the human soul with the supreme and only Being.
The doctrine of Samsara holds that different forms of existence may be phases of the same soul and thus
prepares the way for the doctrine that all forms of existence are the same and all souls parts of, or even
identical with the Atman or Self, the divine soul which not only pervades the world but is the world.
Connected with this doctrine is another, namely, that the whole world of phenomena is Maya or illusion.
Nothing really exists except the supreme Atman: all perception of plurality and difference is illusion and
error: the reality is unity, identity and rest. The development of these ideas leads to some of the principal
systems of philosophy and will claim our attention later. At present I merely give their outlines as indicative
of Hindu thought and temperament. The Indian thinks of this world as a circular and unending journey, an
ocean without shore, a shadow play without even a plot. He feels more strongly than the European that change
is in itself an evil and he finds small satisfaction in action for its own sake. All his higher aspirations bid him
extricate himself from this labyrinth of repeated births, this phantasmagoria of fleeting, unsubstantial visions
and he has generally the conviction that this can be done by knowledge, for since the whole Samsara is
illusion, it collapses and ceases so soon as the soul knows its own real nature and its independence of
phenomena. This conviction that the soul in itself is capable of happiness and in order to enjoy needs only the
courage to know itself and be itself goes far to correct the apathy which is the great danger of Indian thought.
It is also just to point out that from the Upanishads down to the writings of Rabindranath Tagore in the present
day Indian literature from time to time enunciates the idea that the whole universe is the manifestation of
some exuberant force giving expression to itself in joyous movement. Thus the Taittiriya Upanishad (III. 6)
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